Avoiding the Madness
by ecarden
Summary: How did Gibbs become a madman bent on the domination of the solar system? And how did he have the tools and weapons to beat everyone else at every turn? I mean, sure, the fact that everyone else is an idiot helps, but still... Oh, he's got a timeship. That explains everything. Probably. Eventually.


Chapter 1: It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time—3291 AD

I've been interrogated before. Once by the Martians, after Sasha chose to invite Troy Hammershmiddtt over so she could show him the model she was boning and gave him the access codes to our base. Once by space pirates after Palmer decided fighting them would make him late for a date. And about a dozen times by Titan's police forces, due to the jackassery of all of my teammates.

Well, except Jodi. She's never got me arrested. I think that's what I like most about her. Well, that and her girl-next-door good looks. And this thing she does with her tongue which—is really none of your business. Hey! You'd be trying to distract yourself with pleasant memories too, if you were in my shoes.

The point of all this is, I've dealt with hostile interrogations before. Drugs, beatings, creepy advances by even creepier jailors. But in all my experience, no one started an interrogation by ripping out one of my _fucking_ eyes and threatening to rape my new face hole. That was a new one on me.

Not just the whole, ripping my eye out thing, which okay, definitely new, and definitely _sucked_ , but also the fact that the other jackass in red body armor didn't stop him, but instead complained that they weren't supposed to start ripping off my body parts until after I answered their questions. I'd heard of good cop, bad cop, but this was violent cop, murdery cop. Not good tactics.

Fortunately, when I was able to speak and not scream like a punk, I was able to actually say a line I never thought I would get a chance to speak, namely, 'Take me to your leader, dickbags.'

Okay, I may have modified it a little bit. But it was standard practice when dealing with an organization filled with psychopaths and assholes. Go up the chain of command until you find one of the people who have to be sane for an organization to survive. Usually this isn't too hard. This time, I had to get to the second of command of the ship, through eight layers of crazy fucks to get to one woman who could understand 'Don't torture me, do cut me in, and I'll take you to my source of mint-condition ancient ships, like mine.'

We came to an agreement. We'd go get my ships after they finished the raid they'd been on the way to when they stumbled over my ship, use the proceeds from that to buy the fuel and equipment they'd need to handle my alleged mothballed ships. Personally, I planned to escape preferably by blowing them all up, well before that.

The first officer (a valkyresque woman almost a foot taller than me, who looked like someone had put all of her, except the fun bits, through a blender) was even willing to offer me treatment in their medical bay. When I arrived their doctor was screaming like a lunatic as she took off a soldier's mangled limbs and replaced them with cybernetic limbs. They clearly thought me a wimp for declining their treatment, but fuck the lot of 'em.

I chose to get some gauze, grab some meds from the cabinet while the doctor was distracted by her patient's attempted escape, before I retreated towards my quarters for some self-medication (I also stopped by the messhall where my former tormentor was eating, grabbed food and a big old bottle of booze and retreated before the lunatic could do more than leer unpleasantly at me).

The quarters were a disaster. Whoever had had them before I did was a disgusting slob. I'd never actually seen a spaceship with mold on it before, but most spaceships didn't have carpet, either. Fortunately, their computer security was as shitty as the rest of their ship (seriously, the password was 'password') but their computer system had some good data, including on the meds I had grabbed. This weird self-injector thing was filled with nanobots which would stop bleeding and repair internal damage. Or so it claimed, I would have held off, on the basis that anything coming from the crazy people was probably not to be trusted, but there were excellent studies, written in words of more than one syllable, which made sense all the way through.

And my head hurt.

I admit, I sorta hoped that it would regrow my eye, but it did stop the whole, leaking thing. Then I used the gauze to create a make-shift eyepatch. After all that (and discovering how unpleasant it was to try to cry with only one eye) I took to exploring their computer system. Unfortunately, the actual ship control systems were on a separate, unconnected, system I could not access from the terminal. Given what I'd seen of the crew, I was fairly sure that once I had access to those systems, I'd be able to penetrate them at the weakest point, the operator.

After securing my quarters as best I could, with tripwires and a few other manual traps (I didn't trust any of their tech), I turned my attention to educating myself on the universe I'd fallen into. My crewmates (and only my years with Titan Force Five let me get through that reference without barfing all over the quarters, not that that would have been visible) were former members of the Crimson Lance, the military force of some sort of super-powered corporation, identified as Atlas. Apparently the company had suffered some reversals and abandoned its personnel in this sector, who had promptly turned to piracy.

The history of the Crimson Lance was a quick and depressing read. The tale of a military organization overwhelmed by its own stupidity, a single traitor and a quarter of outsiders, whose commander was a five year old. Raising people from childhood to be assassins was immoral, but not inherently stupid. Using children who had families was pretty stupid. Letting one of your highly trained assassins discover that she has a sibling is stupid. Sending her to the same planet her sister is on is damn stupid. Deciding after she tells you she's taking her sister and leaving that you should trick her into murdering her own sister is so suicidally stupid that I'm shocked the organization lasted as long as it did.

On the other hand, incompetence on the part of your captors is generally good. On the third hand, they clearly had a tendency to turn in stupid and unpredictable ways on people they still needed, much like they still needed me. That's why I hate dealing with crazy people. I really thought I was done with that when Titan Force Five was decommissioned. But no, I had to go out in the Solar System, trying to prove myself as an independent force, without Palmer there to seize all the credit. Ah, well, I survived those lunatics, I'll survive these lunatics as well. And I'll show them all why they shouldn't fuck with Gibson "Gibbs" Giberstein.

 **Author's Note: This is the story of how Gibbs became Super-King Big-Nuts. And why. Comments and reviews are always welcome.**


End file.
